Architecture-driven variation analysis for designing cloud applications

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one central technical foundation supporting the rapidly emerging Cloud Computing paradigm. To date, however, its application practice is not always successful. One major reason is the lack of a systematic engineering process and tool supported by reusable architectural artifacts. Toward this ultimate goal, this paper proposes a variation oriented analysis method of performing architectural building blocks (ABB)-based SOA solution design for enabling cloud application design. We present the modeling of solution-level architectural artifacts and their relationships, whose formalization enables event based variation notification and propagation analysis. We report a prototype tool and describe how we extend the Unified Modeling Language (UML) mechanism to implement the system and enable solution-level variation analysis and enforcement in business cloud as an example. © 2009 IEEE.